I'm trying to troubleshoot my friend's laptop. It's an HP NX6310. She just bought a new hard drive for it because it said there was no hard disk detected during Windows XP Setup. After installing the new Hard Drive it is telling me the same thing. "No Hard Disk was detected, setup unable to continue. I'm not sure what to make of it as the Hard Drive is obviously connected. What can I do? I know PC's inside and out but this is my first laptop attempt and was just wondering if there's any quircks I need to know about or watch out for? Thanks, any help or advice is appretiated!

Did you buy a new os? Are you using restore disks? If you are using restore disks it looks for the hard drive for that type/brand. HP is good for that. I needed a new hard drive for my HP desk top. I thought what the hell I'll get a nice one. When I went to install os with the restore disks from Hp that they sent me. It did the same thing yours is. I called HP and the hard drive has codes in it and so dose the restore disks. It will not work on any other hard drive. Hp wants you to buy the hard drive from them. I said no and just got a new copy of XP(sp2) Home for $90.00. Installed fine and I am using it right now.

Go to bios look and see what the hard disk is set as(master,slave,ect). Also on the hard drive in the back dose it have a jumper? I got a new hard drive and it was set to "auto" you may try moving it to the master slot.

It's hard to say what happened to the first drive-perhaps it was damaged, or failed in some way? It's possible there is some other hardware failure that will prevent the new drive from being recognized.
This is a SATA drive, and you need to load the drivers before it will be recognized.
HPs have a recovery partition for re-loading the OS, but this is no longer available to you, as it was on the old drive. It might be worth your while to try to image the old drive, if it is still good.
The manual suggests you make recovery disks for just this purpose, and if you didn't make them, you'll need to get a disk from HP, or a copy of XP.
SATA drives do not have jumpers, so don't worry about that.

Yeah, there's definatly no jumpers on it. I've tried installing XP on it several times now and it just tells me that setup didn't find any hard drives. But it's strange because BIOS sees the drive and if I boot it, it just has a black screen with a cursor blinking in the top left corner of the screen.

o0madseason0o, You will need to slipstream your XP CD. I use nLite DOWNLOAD HERE and Check the manufacturer web site for the drivers or Intel HERE Save nLite to your desktop and open and run from the desktop. Follow the prompts when you open and run nLite to add drivers and create a bootable slipstreamed CD.
Screenshots

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